Fwd [crosspost from LL]: Counter to Pirahan-immediacy thesis?

[Laurence Horn]

>
>LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1184. Thu Apr 19 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.
>
>Subject: 18.1184, Disc: New:  Counter to Pirahan-immediacy thesis?
>
>Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:00:51
>From: Ian Goddard < iamgoddard at yahoo.com >
>Subject: New:  Counter to Pirahan-immediacy thesis?
>
>
>
>The recent issue of The New Yorker has a detailed and thought-provoking
>article on Dan Everett's controversial thesis that the language of the
>Piraha, a remote Amazonian tribe, does not use recursive embedding. [*]
>Perhaps even more remarkable, Everett proposes that the Piraha do not
>generalize and thus do not utilize abstract concepts. Instead they live in
>the moment and thus speak only about immediate or specific observations.
>However, could the following interpretation of a Pirahan statement reported
>in the same article be a counterexample to such an immediacy thesis?
>
>As an example of the immediacy thesis, when a group of Piraha were shown a
>King Kong movie, Everett made the observation about their comments:
>''They're not generalizing about the character of giant apes. [...] They're
>reacting only to the immediate action on the screen with direct assertions
>about what they see.'' [page 137] However, any suggestion that such is a
>universal trait of Pirahan speech seems contradicted by a proposition made
>by a Pirahan at another time, which Everett translated as:
>
>      ''Monkeys go to the jungle.'' [page 133]
>
>The context of the utterance of that proposition was during a formal test
>where the subject, a Pirahan, was to indicate in which direction an
>animated monkey head floats on a computer screen, to the upper-left or
>upper-right corner. Those two were the only options. But when asked in
>which direction he anticipates the monkey head will float, the Pirahan did
>not understand the question and answered instead: ''Monkeys go to the
>jungle.'' [page 133] That case illustrated the difficulty of communicating
>with the Piraha.
>
>But it seems clear from the described context that the Pirahan pointed to
>referents beyond the given monkey immediately before him on the screen,
>referring instead to the abstract set of monkeys and to a universal
>behavior of set members. An important aspect of the context was that the
>Pirahan's answer, 'Monkeys go to the jungle', lacked the ability to allow
>the desired polar distinction to match a left or right distinction. Why?
>Precisely because the statement references *all* monkeys by its implication
>that no monkey should be found that does not go to jungle. As such, the
>Pirahan's proposition could be further translated into first-order
>predicate logic as:
>
>    Monkeys go to the jungle.
>
>    For all x, if x is a Monkey, then x goes to the Jungle.
>
>    Ax( Mx -> Jx )
>
>So it seems that the proposition, 'Monkeys go to the jungle', describes a
>characteristic trait of members of the set called 'monkeys' and as such is
>a clear example of generalizing (universal generalization) and thus of
>conceptual abstraction. Note too that the abstraction defines a
>second-order predicate because the set 'monkeys', being a first-order
>predicate, is a subset of the set of entities that 'go to the jungle'. My
>sideline hunch would be to suspect that even if the Piraha lack discrete
>words for 'all' and 'some', they still manage to communicate such
>distinctions. For example, by the given proposition: ''Monkeys go to the
>jungle.''
>
>Now of course its likely that something has been lost in the cited
>translation. For example, perhaps the author of the article did not
>accurately quote Everett's interpretation, or perhaps Everett's
>interpretation was hasty. However, it just seems clear to me in the
>described context of its utterance the proposition ignores the given monkey
>and points instead to (1) the set of which the given animated monkey was a
>member and (2) a generalized trait of all set members.
>
>Also, in arguing that the Piraha are intelligent Everett notes that they
>''understand the behavior of local animals and how to catch and avoid
>them.'' (page 131) But does not such understanding necessarily entail
>generalizing types of behaviors to abstracted sets of specific types of
>animals? If so, then if a Pirahan sees an animal of type A, she attributes
>to it characteristic behaviors of class-A animals -- if x is an animal and
>is of type A, then x is ... (list class traits). Indeed, that seems to be
>exactly what we observe in the proffered example above. If the Pirahan can
>conceive of characteristic traits of specific sets of animals, surely they
>are necessarily generalizing and abstracting. And if so, then it seems
>improbable or even unimaginable that their language should fail to
>communicate such abstracted conceptions among community members.
>
>That proposed counterexample to the immediacy thesis aside, the New Yorker
>article is a great read and Everett raises many good observations with
>exciting alternative views, and in so doing does us all a favor by
>subjecting the popular view to skeptical inquiry. The scientific process!
>And even if the Piraha do generalize and abstract, as I suggest above, the
>overall picture sounds like abstraction is sufficiently rare in both
>Pirahan words and existence that this surely points to important
>anthropolinguistic facts to be uncovered, especially related to the
>intimate connection between language and perception.
>
>~Ian Goddard
>
>''The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.'' Wittgenstein
>
>[*] Colapinto, John. ''The Interpreter.'' The New Yorker (April 16, 2007)
>118-37.
>http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto
>
>
>Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
>
>
>
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